Separate string from numeric in single Pandas Dataframe column and create two new columns

Question

I'm shocked that no one has asked this on SO before.. since it seems like a simple enough of a problem.

I have a single column in a pandas Dataframe that looks like this:

df = pd.DataFrame(data=[['APPLEGATE WINERY    455.292049'],['AMAND FARM  849.827192'],['COBB FARM ST    1039.49357'],['DIRIGIA 2048.947284']], columns = ['Col1'])

    Col1
0   APPLEGATE WINERY 455.292049
1   AMAND FARM 849.827192
2   COBB FARM ST 1039.49357
3   DIRIGIA 2048.947284

And I just want to separate the string characters from the numeric, so the result should look like this

Name                Area
APPLEGATE WINERY    455.292049
AMAND FARM          849.827192
COBB FARM ST        1039.49357
DIRIGIA             2048.947284

I know I can use Regular Expressions in python, but this seems like overkill since a) it's just a separation of data types and b) the strings have different lengths and the numerics have different numbers of digits.

So one result would start to look like this:

df['Name'] = df.Col1.str.extract('([A-Z]\w{0,})', expand=True)
df['Area'] = df.Col1.str.extract('(\d)', expand=True)

But is there a nice, clean solution out there to solve this problem without going through the hassle of using RegEx and instead separating strings from numerics into two columns?

Answer 1

Use a single extract call. You'll also want to strip trailing whitespaces from the result if you use this regex.

df2 = (df['Col1'].str.extract(r'(?P<Name>.*?)(?P<Area>\d+(?:\.\d+)?)')
                 .applymap(str.strip))
df2
               Name         Area
0  APPLEGATE WINERY   455.292049
1        AMAND FARM   849.827192
2      COBB FARM ST   1039.49357
3           DIRIGIA  2048.947284

Regex Breakdown

(?P<Name>   # first named capture group - "Name"
    .*?     # match anything (non-greedy)
)
(?P<Area>   # second named group - "Area"
    \d+     # match one or more digits,
    (?:     
       \.   # decimal
       \d+  # trailing digits
    )?      # the `?` indicates floating point is optional
)

PS, to convert the "Area" column to numeric, use pd.to_numeric.